A Houston jury has ruled that Johnson & Johnson are to pay $ 773,000 to the family of Michaelynn Thompson, who died after wearing a defective drug patch. No punitive damages were awarded in this case, the first one involving drug patches.
Thompson was wearing a patch that delivers controlled, hourly doses of fentanyl, a commonly used anesthetic that in high doses can turn off the respiratory center in the brain.
A lawyer for the Thompson family says that a leak on the patch she was wearing greatly increased the dose of the painkiller Thompson received. A test by a private-lab showed the level of fentanyl in Thompson's blood was about ten times what it would have normally been for pain-killing.
Johnson and Johnson said it disagrees with the outcome of the wrongful-death trial, in which eleven out of 12 jurors decided the Duragesic patch Thompson wore was defective.
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